Doc Savage - The Pure Evil Part 7

"Sure will!" Monk clearly had a great deal of enthusiasm for keeping an eye on Miss Adams. "You've got good nerves," he said. "You're holding up fine."

"Yes, specially when you remember the performance I gave while being handed out the window a while ago," Gail said bitterly. "I didn't even do a good job of screaming. I sounded like a cricket that a chicken had just swallowed."

"I didn't exactly sing myself," Monk confessed. "Whew! It must've been fifty feet from that window to the ground. I think I flattened my feet permanently."

"What do you think the purple stuff was?"

"Nothing that I cared particularly about seeing. Have you any suggestions?"

"How," Gail asked, s.h.i.+vering, "did it make Mr. Morand disappear?"

"Considering that story he had told us, I bet he wasn't surprised," Monk guessed."You don't really know what to think, do you?"

"That's it exactly," Monk told her. "I've got some ideas, but they seem to go with strait jackets and the water treatment. I'm avoiding them."

Monk's information wasn't enlightening, but he had a sort of belligerent grin on his homely face that was rea.s.suring. Gail felt better, without knowing why she should.

"Somehow, I have confidence in Doc Savage," she said. "Although he hasn't done anything too spectacular so far. Except jump from the window with me. That was an amazing physical feat."

"The compet.i.tion in the spectacular has been pretty lively, but give Doc time," Monk told her confidently.

"He's a slow starter. In the last act, just before the curtain goes down, is where you get your money's worth from Doc."

"He's really as phenomenal as Mr. Tremaine said he was?"

"Tremaine? . . . Oh, the ex-boy-friend who told you about Doc some time ago. . . . Well, Tremaine probably didn't exaggerate."

Gail swung over to the window, to stand and try to grasp more of this new relief. She needed it badly.

Being a self-sufficient sort, she wasn't accustomed to tying to someone else for mental security. But suddenly she felt quite glad that she did have someone as competent as Savage for an anchor in this storm of the gory and the unbelievable.

The sun had floated high by now. There were hard solid steel-like clouds in the sky, and the sun rimed them with chill light. Out of the clouds, or out of somewhere, came the hard shotting pellets of snow, and Gail listened to them, wind-driven, making a myriad of knitting sounds against the gla.s.s.

The unloading ramp was below here, and she watched a plane come in from the runway in use. She noticed that it belonged to the same airline she had ridden, and remembered that it wasn't too large a line and operated only that one southern route. So she surmised that it would be the plane that followed on schedule after the one she had taken.

She had a twinge of feeling about the plane. It symbolized, for a moment, the Southland that she'd left a few hours ago. She thought of her brother, and had to take very tight hold of her composure. She looked down at the plane, thinking how infrequently tragedy really touched human beings, and wondering if by chance it carried anyone who had come all the way from her home town to New York. . . .

Monk Mayfair was nibbling a fingernail and wondering just what variety of snide trick he could pull on Ham Brooks, the dapper attorney. He had carried on a not too bloodthirsty-at times-feud with Ham Brooks for a long while, and frequently suspected himself of getting the worst end of it. This spooky stuff, this abracadabra about the essence of evil getting out of the box where the devil kept it-to embellish Mr. Morand's story a little-should offer something in the way of an evener-upper with Ham.

Monk had progressed to thinking about his ignominious leap from the window, and wis.h.i.+ng Ham had leaped instead of himself, and he had been there to see it, when Gail filled the room with a pure shrill shriek. Monk jumped. He felt that he rose up in the air and remained there a time.

Gail pointed frantically.

"There! Getting out of the plane!" she cried. "I know that man!"

Monk regained a posture on the floor, and jumped to her side. "What's that?""There," said Gail. "The average-sized man who is wearing the blue business suit. You see him? Just pa.s.sing that cart piled with baggage!"

"I see him," Monk said. "Now what about him?"

"I know him."

Monk ran a hand through his hair, as if tempted to yank some out. "I don't see his horns yet. Or do you whoop like that about all the men you know?"

"But it's Mr. Gibble!"

"Oh. . . . Mr. Gibble?" Monk hadn't hooked it up yet.

"Mr. Gibble," Gail told him sharply, "is employed at the station where my brother worked. He's working on radar also. He has been there several weeks, I understand. . . . But I don't understand why he has rushed to New York?"

"I don't either," Monk said with an enlightened air. "But it's something we can use to open a conversation. Let's go down and accost Mr. Gibble."

They arrived breathless at the main floor and sprinted into the large waiting-room of the terminal. Mr.

Gibble gave them a bad moment by doing a too obvious thing-he was standing gaping at the big replica of the globe that formed part of the decorative motif of the terminal lobby-and presently they discovered him.

"Is this guy the solid sort?" Monk asked as they made for Gibble. "Or do you think we can stampede him with a little brisk footwork at the beginning?"

"I don't know him well," Gail said. "That's not his fault, though."

"He's tried, has he?"

Gail nodded. "Every time. I'm afraid it did him no good. Somehow he always reminded me of one of those big gold-colored caterpillars crawling on my hand."

"I can understand his trying." Monk was examining Gibble as they drew near. "He does have kind of a fuzzy golden look at that. That's English cloth and first-line tailoring in that suit he's wearing. Three hundred bucks worth of suit. On him, it looks tired."

Monk's suit looked tired also, and they always did, but his acquaintance with fine garb and what it cost was acquired from Ham Brooks, and hence first-rate. It, possibly didn't occur to Gail to be surprised, because she was staring at Gibble.

"h.e.l.lo, there, Mr. Gibble!" Gail called.

Gibble jumped. He seemed to feel as Monk had felt a few moments ago, as if he had risen in the air and wasn't coming down.

He did come down, and hit running. The take-off was preposterous in its abruptness. His feet on the tile floor briskly imitated a barber doing a hard job of whetting a razor, then he was going. He was off.

Monk, already applying steam, had the same trouble with the smooth floor and his feet. Monk's greater bulk gave him an increased inertia, so he had even more trouble than Gibble. And, once under way, Monk's running style, of the loose-legged floppity-hop school, computed poorly with Gibble's longskating glide.

When he saw Gibble was gaining, Monk began yelling. His howling, the whacking of his feet on the floor, stirred a commotion. It also opened a wide path for Gibble, who flew out through the door. Not the door to the street and taxicabs and sidewalk, but the other door through which Gibble had lately come. The one to the loading ramp. There he vanished.

Monk reached the door a moment later, dived through, and squared off to resume the chase. His smallish eyes hunted vainly for Gibble, and presently he said, "Oh my G.o.d, not another penetralia mentis visit!"

He spoke from the heart.

Gail arrived. "Which way did he go?"

Monk yelled the same question at an airport employee who was going past rolling a plane tire along the ground with one hand. "Which way'd the guy in the blue suit go?"

"Yonder," said the man, pointing casually.

Yonder implied a succession of baggage trucks, mail dollies, gangplanks and other equipment into which Gibble could have dodged. And clearly had, Monk hoped.

"Gibble!" he yelled. "You're just making it worse!"

Gibble did not appear. Monk began searching, but with no immediate success. He called to Gail. "He's around here somewhere. You go back in the terminal and yell for a cop-and oh, oh!" He had spied Gibble.

The footrace that followed chastened Monk somewhat. Because Gibble outran him. There was no question about it; Gibble was faster on his feet.

"He got away!" Gail gasped, catching up with Monk.

"I'm not unhappy anyway," Monk told her. "I was beginning to think he'd done one of those dematerializations on us."

They did not give up the hunt for Gibble. They spent almost fifteen minutes at it. Monk was telling Gail that Gibble had probably gotten a cab without their noticing, when Doc Savage joined them with different information.

"Your quarry," Doc said, "took a plane."

"Huh?"

"He went south," Doc added. "The plane that just took off a few moments ago."

"Huh?" Monk repeated.

Gail said, "Mr. Gibble is always saying 'huh?' I could get a distaste for that word."

Doc added further, "It's all right. Ham Brooks went along."

"How," Gail demanded, "did you know about Mr. Gibble?"

"You created quite a commotion, chasing him out of the waiting room," Doc explained. "It was noticed. I asked questions, and got several descriptions of Gibble which, put together, fitted the earlier one you hadfurnished. About that time, Gibble came to the ticket-counter in a hurry and bought a ticket back home.

Ham bought one also, and took the same plane. Gibble didn't seem to know Ham by sight, fortunately."

Gail didn't think much of the move. "But why did you let him escape?"

"The answer to this," Doc said, "seems to lie back at the place where it started. And Gibble has hardly escaped. Ham Brooks will shadow him."

"Another thing I dislike is an indirect way of doing things," Gail announced grimly. "Gibble obviously is involved. It seems to me the thing to do would have been grab him and extract the truth."

Doc let this pa.s.s. He asked, "Monk, will you need anything in the way of baggage for a trip south? If not, we can get going immediately?"

Monk said he couldn't think of anything.

"Then we'll leave now. We'll shake together something in the way of breakfast on the plane then Miss Adams can sleep."

Gail seemed stunned. "What about Mr. Morand?"

"Morand isn't with us," Doc reminded her. "He left in a cloud of blue smoke, for parts unknown."

Gail shuddered. "I don't think that's a bit funny."

Doc said it wasn't intended to be. Monk, who knew Doc quite well, gathered that the bronze man was pleased about developments. He saw no cause for satisfaction himself. He couldn't imagine a more thoroughly inexplicable mess.

The plane was in a hangar at the other end of the field, and enroute there in a taxi, Doc gave another piece of information.

He said, "Ham checked with the airline on Morand's plane reservation up here from the south. The airlines keep a fairly good record of those things, you know. There was an odd point about the reservation."

"Nothing could look odd to me now," Monk said. "What was it?"

"Morand made the plane reservation nearly two weeks ago."

A gasp of surprise came from Gail. "Then Morand wasn't on the plane deliberately to follow me!"

"Apparently not," Doc said. "No, I think it was a coincidence that you took the same plane. Probably a plan was working, a plan that had been laid some time back. And your taking the plane looked like an upset. Possibly that was why the attempt was made to kill you."

"You mean someone thought I knew more than I did?"

"Perhaps."

"I'm confused," Gail said.

"You're not without company," Monk a.s.sured her.

Chapter VIII.

THEY pa.s.sed-Gail was perfectly willing to take Monk's word for this-the airliner bearing Gibble some four or five hundred miles out of New York City. Gail did not see the airliner. She had not seen anything except brilliant eye-hurting sunlight since New York had dropped behind them with a kind of banshee moan. Monk was tinkering with the radio, eavesdropping on the airline frequency, and he collected the information about the location of Gibble's plane.

After that, Gail found the flight dreadfully monotonous. Dreadful, because she couldn't sleep, and couldn't think, either, with any degree of sanity about the mystery.

This plane frightened her somewhat also. She'd read of jet s.h.i.+ps, seen pictures of them, seen them in the newsreels. She'd never had a desire to ride in one of them, particularly at the neighborhood of five hundred miles an hour. They were also, she'd learned, above thirty thousand feet. She was having ghastly thoughts about what could happen if something went wrong. If the pressurized cabin popped open, they'd probably explode like popcorn. Certainly they'd freeze, or perish from lack of oxygen, before reaching a lower level. She'd read an article somewhere about the perils of high-alt.i.tude jet flights at near the speed of sound. She was plain scared.

In an astonis.h.i.+ngly short time, less than a third the interval required for the New York trip, they were dropping down toward a cl.u.s.ter of tiny mottled colors by the sea. Her town. New York had looked small. This was tiny. Doc brought the s.h.i.+p into the traffic pattern, contacted the control tower, and presently they were on the runway. To avoid too much interest in the unusual s.h.i.+p, Doc avoided the administration building, taxied to a hangar on the opposite side of the field, and arranged immediately for hangarage.

To get the s.h.i.+p out of sight seemed to be his immediate idea. And Gail understood why when mechanics and pilots at the hangar cl.u.s.tered about, peering into the c.o.c.kpit, discussing the powerplant, numerous other unique features the s.h.i.+p seemed to have.

Doc tried using an a.s.sumed name, discovered he was known by sight, and devoted some time to getting promises that it wouldn't be advertised that he was in town. The newspapers particularly, weren't to know.

"Now I see what it's like to be a celebrity," Gail said thoughtfully.

Doc said, "Monk, you're less conspicuous. So you stay at the field, and lend Ham a hand if he needs one. We don't want to lose Gibble."

Monk seemed not particularly enthusiastic about the job. "If that shyster lawyer insults me again," he said, "I'm not gonna stand still for it. I've finally decided to take him apart."

When she was in a cab with Doc Savage, riding into town, Gail suggested, "Mr. Mayfair and Mr.

Brooks don't seem to get along well, do they?"